Are Students Who Take the Extended Project Qualification Better Prepared for Higher Education? Research Report

The Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) is available for students in Key Stage 5 (KS5), to be taken alongside other qualifications, such as A levels. It differs from most other academic qualifications at KS5 because it is not examined, but instead involves students undertaking an in-depth project in an area of their choosing. Students are required to plan the project, research and analyse sources of information, write up their analysis, draw conclusions and produce an evaluation of the processes involved. As such, it is promoted by exam boards as providing the skills required for university study or for work. The main purpose of this research was to investigate whether students taking EPQ were better prepared for higher education (HE) than students not taking it. The following questions were addressed: (1) Are EPQ students more likely than non-EPQ students to progress to HE (after accounting for other factors likely to affect this, such as prior attainment)? (2) Are EPQ students less likely than non-EPQ students to drop-out of HE (after accounting for other factors)? and (3) Is taking an EPQ associated with better degree performance (after accounting for other factors)? This investigation is of particular interest now due to the increase in uptake of the qualification in recent years: between 2008 and 2016, the number of students taking it increased from 1,706 to 38,548 (He & Black, 2018). By 2019, this had increased to 45,687 (Gill, 2022). The main source of data for this project was a dataset linking students between their records in the National Pupil Database (NPD) and in the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) database.